Microsoft's FUSE Labs Unveils Spindex Social Networking Tool

It is hardly a secret that social networking has become a huge part of many peoples' lives.  Many people use social networking programs to keep in touch with current friends, find friends from the past, or make new ones.  Many also use social networking for their businesses as an avenue to increase exposure.  Regardless of what they use it for, social networking is an integral part of many people's lives. 

To complicate things a bit, the popularity of such programs has caused plenty of expansion, creating information overload for a number of users.  Whether it be Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter, there is a plethora of information and updates to keep up with, and that grows exponentially depending on the number of people in your social networking circle.  Thus, FUSE's introduction of Spindex is a welcome sight.

What Spindex does is allow users to combine and access various social networking tools into one consolidated view.  Among the programs currently slated to be available from Spindex are Facebook, Twitter, RSS, Bing, and Evernote.  Once it is officially released for public use, many more programs are expected to be usable with Spindex as well.

Spindex, besides allowing for social networking consolidation, spices things up a bit by allowing users to access key and relevant information to their social circles.  Rather than simply bombarding you with basic status updates and the like, Spindex will supposedly also allow you to be more knowledgeable about what your friends are talking about in their updates and pages. 

It does this by using the Bing search engine.  Spindex will use keywords and what seem to be important topics within your circle and take things one step further.  Instead of just reading what your friends are saying, Spindex will suggest related reference articles using Bing that will allow you to become more informed of the topics at hand.  By providing these relevant suggestions, you can not only expand your mind and converse with others on topics that were relatively unknown to you, but you can also help weed out a lot of the excess information that comes with social networking, too.

The proposed use of Bing and the relevancy that Spindex will bring makes it innovative.  Just combining various social networking programs into one is not something entirely new, as others have allowed for this simple consolidation before.  Two examples of this come to mind with Tweetdeck and AOL's Lifestream.  While those two are solid tools, Spindex' integration of Bing takes everything to another level.

Hopefully FUSE will continue the Spindex project and make it completely public in the near future.  Once released, Spindex should help make social networking not only entertaining, but more educational as well.

For more on FUSE Labs' Spindex project, visit PC World's article.